Stephen Shimshock's List: Social Construction

Trial by consensus sounds sketchy, but majority opinion has nearly always dictated society's definition of truth. A 15th century encyclopedia would have insisted that the sun revolves around the earth. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica asserted that bacteria causes the flu, since viruses hadn't been discovered yet. So perhaps it's not a question of whether to trust consensus. Rather, whose consensus do you want to trust: a handful of experts, or thousands of anonymous Internet users and a clever computer algorithm?